…a forum for the discussion of political, social and economic issues affecting the indigenous peoples of the United States, including their lack of political representation, economic deprivation, health care issues, and the on-going struggle for preservation of identity and cultural history

Canada has endorsed the UN Declaration on indigenous peoples three years after the declaration was approved by the General Assembly.

In a statement released last Friday, Canada’s Indian and Northern Affairs department said, ‘The Government of Canada would like to acknowledge the Aboriginal men and women who played an important role in the development of this Declaration.

‘In endorsing the Declaration, Canada reaffirms its commitment to build on a positive and productive relationship with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples to improve the well-being of Aboriginal Canadians, based on our shared history, respect, and a desire to move forward together.’

I dreamed I was dead and talking to your spirit at the tree of life Mr. President. You were somewhat annoyed at having been summoned by greater powers than you, but you listened and were very considerate of hearing what I had to say. I didn’t need to tell you all the details of what you are considering signing, and I understood your complex predicament. I told you that you had a choice to make since most the remaining natural resources of the Earth Mother are on Indigenous lands, and you are president of all the people of this country. I told you I pitied your predicament and would not want it for myself. When respecting one’s sacred lands means compromising the survival of another, how do you decide between what is right and necessary but evil?

Barack Obama might support the United Nations Declaration of Indigenous Rights, First Nations leaders said after meeting with the president-elect´s Indian advisers on Thursday.

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Around 50 indigenous representatives from the Americas attended the special session Dec. 9-12 at OAS headquarters in the Simón Bolívar Room.

You know you cannot damage the land without damaging The People, and you know we cannot change fast enough to reverse the course our Earth Mother is on, much less change from a carbon based economy to a green economy over night. And how sad you must feel in your heart sometimes Mr. President – because while the answers are right in front of us – it is greed that in the end will kill us all. It is greed that continues to kill our relatives in the water and who fly above it – not the oil. The water of life, enough for many Nations, has become death to those relatives and ways of life that once depended on it. As we talked Mr. President, you knew those things, but you had never thought about what I said next.

There are those of us who know we are American Indian, but who don’t know what language we speak. We don’t know who are clans are anymore. We can not go to all of the graves of our ancestors to pay respect or mourn, for we will never know who they were. We are the result of the Final Solution. And the primary reason is that our ancestor’s land was stolen from them, and their languages were intentionally stamped out. While it is true that languages have survived, that specific lineage in us is gone forever. And you know, Mr. President, that respecting all the unique sovereignty of all the Indigenous Peoples is the core of the UN Declaration. Therefore, I asked you questions to help you relate to the issues at hand.

Would you like it if your daughters did not know who their father was? Would you like it if your daughters did not know the language you spoke, but had been forced into speaking a different tongue for the sake of Manifest Destiny?

Those of us whose specific lineage is gone forever have relatives from many Nations, but we won’t even be a memory seven generations from now as being from that specific lineage. Mr. President, and I can only speak for myself, don’t let my present become any one else’s future.

On November 5, 2009 at a historic summit in Washington, DC hosted by President Barack Obama, Chairman Joe Kennedy – Timbisha Shoshone of the Western Shoshone Nation, delivered a message on behalf of the Nations and Pueblos of Indigenous Peoples of North America calling for immediate action by the present US administration in affirmation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

This call to implement the UNDRIP after centuries of colonization and injustice, institutes a new systemic standard that allows for complementary readjustment among entities of the government states and the Nations and Pueblos of Indigenous Peoples globally, normalizing peaceful relations and creating partnerships based on mutual respect and cooperation.

New Apostolic Leaders, “Christian” fascists, have burned Native American objects in Hawaii and I assume Oklahoma. But first, when would “‘Christian’ fascists” be an entirely appropriate term? When they are “without ethical or legal restraints” and show demonstrative signs of redemptive violence.

”A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Can anyone designated an “unlawful enemy combatant” be detained indefinitely, even a U.S. citizen?

In describing who may be tried by military commissions, the MCA defines “unlawful enemy combatant” very broadly, so that it could encompass:

* U.S. citizens picked up in the United States,

* any other person picked up anywhere in the world,

* people who are far from any battlefield,

* people who have not have engaged directly in any hostilities against the United States,

* people who may not even have committed terrorist acts,

* people whose activities have no connection to war or armed conflict,

* anyone determined to be one by tribunals established by the President or the Secretary of Defense.

The MCA does not explicitly authorize indefinite detention. In fact, the principal drafters of the MCA, Senators Graham, Warner and McCain, specifically noted that the Act’s definition of “unlawful enemy combatant” applies only for purposes of trials by the military commissions. However, there is nothing in the Act that would require “unlawful enemy combatants” to be brought to trial. Without such a requirement, the new law leaves open the possibility that people may continue to be held indefinitely.

The definition of “unlawful enemy combatant” also raises serious concerns because it blurs the most fundamental distinction the laws of war make between combatants and non-combatants, and between circumstances where ordinary criminal laws protect individual rights, and where the special laws of war apply. The administration has argued that the entire world is a battlefield in “the global war against terrorism,” which it argues is a new kind of war, where few rules apply. Congressional approval of this broad “enemy combatant” definition reinforces that view.

Some attempted redemptive violence has arrived and some successful redemptive violence has occurred, the former and possibly the latter used a technique by the New Apostolic Reformation: Spiritual Mapping.

The arrests of members of a Michigan-based “Christian” militia group should convince doubters that there is good reason to worry about right-wing, anti-government extremism — and potential violence — in the Age of Obama.

I put the word Christian in quotes because anyone who plots to assassinate law enforcement officers, as a federal indictment alleges members of the Hutaree militia did, is no follower of Christ.

Fox News Complicit In George Tiller’s Death

So, what are some specific instances of cultural genocide the “Christian” fascists might accomplish or have accomplished against the American Indian in the United States?

One of the intentions of HEALING for the NATIVES MINISTRIES is “dismantling of the cement tomb over the mass grave” at Wounded Knee.

Furthermore, “serving the Lord” also takes the form of “dismantling of the cement tomb over the mass grave” at Wounded Knee.

Source

THE HEALING OF WOUNDED KNEE

Ministering to Native people has exposed a gaping hole in the soul of Indian Country. This festering wound is a result of the massacre at Wounded Knee in South Dakota and other atrocities. The Spirit of God has given me a prophetic picture of the healing of Wounded Knee and the massacer site; including the dismantling of the cement tomb over the mass grave and restoring the site to an original earthen mound with wild flowers and prairie grass and a lodge pole burying scaffold, in addition, the Holy Spirit has given us access to certain items that I believe God will use to bring healing to Wounded Knee.

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The partnership of Native Ministers with the American Church will ignite revival and thrust the Body of Christ into all the world ending with the salvation of Israel.

Spiritual Warfare necessitates proximity and location as military strategy. Specific instances of cultural genocide the “Christian” fascists have committed are burning “objects that were worshiped as part of their native religions” in Maui and “the Baal caves in the panhandle of Oklahoma” being desecrated. Both promote “act(s) of smashing pottery that depicted Baal and Leviathan.”

“Pastor Jim Marocco… planted a church on the island of Maui. He had people bring and burn occult items, specifically objects that were worshiped as part of their native religions. After the objects were destroyed, his church experienced great growth.” (Deliver Us from Evil, page 225)

When the first colonizers landed on the Ka Pae ‘Aina (the Hawaiian Archipelago) in 1778, they were greeted by a people who introduced themselves as the Kanaka Maoli-Kanaka meaning “human being,” Maoli meaning “real” or “genuine.” But to the colonizers they were “naked savages.” Almost immediately the process of stripping the “real” people of their land, resources, and culture began. Kekuni Blaisdell, a Kanaka Maoli from the island of O’ahu, has spent his life promoting the spiritual and physical health of the Kanaka Maoli and restoring their nation.

Running against former Democratic Congressional Representative Neal Abercrombie to be Hawaii’s next governor, Republican Lt. Governor James “Duke” Aiona has disavowed his relationship with an international evangelical ministry called the International Transformation Network, whose leaders advocate burning religious artifacts and native art.

John Benefiel then informed the gathering of the history of Baal in the region. He shared the story of the Baal caves in the panhandle of Oklahoma where cave drawings depict the presence of those who worshiped Baal. There were drawings of Baal (the Sun god), Anubis and calendars which marked out the equinox (the time established for worshiping Baal). The inscriptions dedicated the land to Baal. An internet article on the caves can be read at http://www2.privatei.com/~bart… Jay Swallow presented his testimony. Jay is an apostle of the Native Americans who has tremendous authority over the spiritual issues of our land.

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Jay taught on the unholy trio of Baal, Asherah and Leviathan. He spoke of their proliferation into the land. His teaching led us up to the prophetic act of smashing pottery that depicted Baal and Leviathan. Knowing that this authority lies with those who dwelt on this land first, it was necessary that it be carried out by a Native American.

Nearly one century and a half after the death of Roman Nose, Apostle Jay Swallow is on the War Council, has accepted the apology from the United States on behalf of all Tribal Nations, wars against evil, possesses medicine to make rain, and has divine authority to commit cultural genocide.

In addition to “Jay is an apostle of the Native Americans who has tremendous authority over the spiritual issues of our land,” he aids in running a Military training camp in Oklahoma.

What will Jay Swallow do next, since “authority lies with those who dwelt on this land first, it was necessary that it be carried out by a Native American,” and “His teaching led us up to the prophetic act of smashing pottery that depicted Baal and Leviathan?”

Dr. Jay has proved his authority over land issues – dealing with four things that defile the land: false worship, sexual immorality, broken covenants and the shedding of innocent blood. He has been called from Fiji to Hawaii, from Argentina to Canada and many points in between. We are honored that Dr. Jay has taken an interest in San Antonio.

So, since cultural genocide that “Christian” fascists are committing by destroying Native American cultural objects may not be taken seriously by some –

On and after August 11, 1978, it shall be the policy of the United States to protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religions of the American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and Native Hawaiians, including but not limited to access to sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonials and traditional rites.

Oyet is a self-designated Apostle and leader of the Lifeline Ministries. He has found favor with President Museveni for praying against areas of Northern Uganda once controlled by the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army. Oyet’s Born Again Federation in Uganda oversees over 10,000 churches and estimates 9 million Christians attend these churches.

Oyet promotes what is known as the “7 mountains strategy”; this is the belief that Christianity should advance in a society by taking control of seven domains:

To establish The Kingdom of God on the earth, we must claim and possess The Seven Mountains of Culture namely: Business, Government, Religion, Family, Media, Education and Entertainment.

“Alters, alters have been put up all over the place, where they made a covenant with the gods. The four major places, sites where these things can be found – to confirm it as an alter. The water spots, the forests, and then on the rocks; and fourthly, on the graveyards. Any time you get a pot with the drinking tubes, in one of four areas, it is a sign that that is an alter. A covenant was made there.” Superstition, idolatry, and witchcraft, have stood as the ever present partners – of these unspeakable horrors. They continue, to do so, today.

The video states, “but man has not pursued these dark deeds alone” after mentioning: cannibalism, the wars in Uganda, mutilation, and murder. George Otis, Jr., the producer of the video, wants his audience to blame the atrocities and wars on alters residing on “the four major places” by deduction. Dehumanization precedes extermination, dehumanizing a people’s sacred sites and alters precedes cultural genocide. But to them, it’s possessing the culture of all religions “To establish The Kingdom of God on the earth.”

- during one of the most heavily covered American mid-term elections in history, a wave of politicians associated with a nakedly supremacist evangelical ministry whose leaders make statements ideologically reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades,

“To establish The Kingdom of God on the earth.”

Columbus’s first voyage in 1492 combined with his religious motivations for making it led Pope Alexander VI to issue a Papal Bull in 1493.

Pope Alexander VI ordered Ferdinand and Isabella to observe and to do the following: that the primary purpose of all future voyages and ensuing discoveries of land and people was to Christianize and “overthrow” any Nations who resisted; that Columbus himself be used for the next voyage, since there was consensus among Columbus, Ferdinand, Isabella, and the Papacy with regards to spreading Christianity to the entire world; that the Indians might have been good converts; that all this was to be carried out “By the Authority of Almighty God;” that it applied to the entire world; that any possible Christian rulers were to not be overthrown; that Ferdinand and Isabella had power over such possible Christian rulers, while the Papacy had power over them and any possible Christian rulers; that overthrown Nations would have a Christian ruler put in place; that anyone who traded with anyone who overthrew a Christian ruler would be excommunicated; and that anyone who went against the Papal Bull would “Incur the wrath of Almighty God.”

When Christopher Columbus first set foot on the white sands of Guanahani island, he performed a ceremony to “take possession” of the land for the king and queen of Spain, acting under the international laws of Western Christendom. Although the story of Columbus’ “discovery” has taken on mythological proportions in most of the Western world, few people are aware that his act of “possession” was based on a religious doctrine now known as the Doctrine of Discovery. Even fewer people realize that today –five centuries later– the United States government still uses this archaic Judeo-Christian doctrine to deny the rights of Native American Indians.

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In 1823, the Christian Doctrine of Discovery was quietly adopted into U.S. law by the Supreme Court in the celebrated case, JOHNSON v. McINTOSH (8 Wheat., 543). Writing for the unanimous court, Chief Justice John Marshall observed that Christian European nations had assumed “ultimate dominion” over the lands of America during the Age of Discovery, and that–upon “discovery”–the Indians had lost “their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations,” and only retained a right of “occupancy” in their lands. In other words, Indian nations were subject to the ultimate authority of the first nation of Christendom to claim possession of a given region of Indian lands. [Johnson: 574; Wheaton: 270-1]

While the different nations of Europe respected the right of the natives, as occupants, they asserted the ultimate dominion to be in themselves; and claimed and exercised, as a consequence of this ultimate dominion, a power to grant the soil, while yet in possession of the natives. These grants have been understood by all, to convey a title to the grantees, subject only to the Indian right of occupancy.

The history of America, from its discovery to the present day, proves, we think, the universal recognition of these principles.

Spain did not rest her title solely on the grant of the Pope. Her discussions respecting boundary, with France, with Great Britain, and with the United States, all show that she placed in on the rights given by discovery. Portugal sustained her claim to the Brazils by the same title.

No one of the powers of Europe gave its full assent to this principle, more unequivocally than England. The documents upon this subject are ample and complete. So early as the year 1496, her monarch granted a commission to the Cabots, to discover countries then unknown to Christian people, and to take possession of them in the name of the king of England. Two years afterwards, Cabot proceeded on this voyage, and discovered the continent of North America, along which he sailed as far south as Virginia. To this discovery the English trace their title.

We now have conclusive evidence: In a legal brief filed in the case Tee Hit Ton, the United States government traced the origin of Indian title in U.S. law to the ideology that discovering Christian sovereigns had the right to take over and acquire the lands of “heathens and infidels.”

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The United States responded to the Tee Hit Ton complaint by stating: “It is a well established principle of international law with respect to the lands of this continent [that] ‘discovery gave title to the government by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments which title might be consummated by possession.’” Here the attorneys for the United States cited Johnson v. M’Intosh, from which they lifted the quoted language.

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Here, then, is the smoking gun: the U.S. government’s legal brief in Tee Hit Ton. It is a gem of religious racism that fully documents the illegitimate foundation of U.S. Indian law and policy. The U.S. legal brief in Tee Hit Ton also demonstrates that this foundation of religious discrimination and racism was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court as recently as 1955, when the court ruled that the Tlingit lands were not their property, and that religiously racist backdrop continues to be invoked whenever the court cites the Doctrine of Discovery.

What are additional rationales for “placing (of a) people in this or that country -”

Most people probably – hopefully – agree that genocide is wrong; at the same time, though, few people are as willing to condemn genocide if it occurs in the context of killing the “enemies” of God.

from the appointment of the Lord?”

How many Christians and Jews read the stories of mass slaughter in the Old Testament and react with horror? How many instead make up excuses for why it was OK for the Israelites to kill off entire groups of human beings? Once you start making such excuses, though, it’s hard to stop and this creates problems for us today.

The answer is, and this is all one can hope to understand, is that there is no rational. There is irrational with economic motivation. For example, land is not valuable to the invaders in and of itself, but for the crops it might yield and the resources on it. But what about the “divine authorization” for genocide, or “the placing of a people in this or that country?”

One can neither prove nor disprove God as one learns from studying the ontological argument. So to, it is safe to say that those who have condoned genocide because they believe a supreme being authorized it believe in a supreme being, or God. It is circular reasoning taken to the extreme, let me attempt to make an example of the irrational. “Doesn’t one commandment say ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill,’ then why is it permissible to exterminate a people? Because God commanded and authorized it, and who are you to question God?”

When asked at the military inquiry why children had been killed, one of the soldiers quoted Chivington as saying, “NITS MAKE LICE.”

Allow me to wrap this up with some circular reasoning of my own. Since God and heaven can not be proved or disproved, then neither can hell. I would hope there is a hell, and I would hope it’s unbearable. Furthermore, I’d hope Mather, Chivington, Custer, Hitler and the like are in it.

The placing of a people in this or that country is from the appointment of the Lord.

“Time is on their side” so long as crimes against humanity continue to be condoned for economic reasons and it will continue as long as the Military Industrial Complex exists with Manifest Destiny being the stage and irrational. The different faces of butchers aren’t going to hell, nor are past ones in it, they’re yet with us as that engine of grief called fundamentalism fuels their irrationality and puts blood money in their bank accounts.

“The report is called ‘Open Secret: Illegal Detention and Torture’ by the Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force in Uganda. It was published last year, April 8, 2009, and it says that the United States provided not only training, but also $5 million for Ugandan security agents to torture individuals detained in Uganda, which is illegal according to the Leahy Amendment, an amendment by Sen. Patrick Leahy, which prohibits U.S. cooperation or funding or training for any government that is torturing its individuals or committing human rights abuse.

“The Trail of Tears began 170 years ago this week. We should recall it not as an aberration but as a logical outgrowth of an inhumane policy. And we should insist, in its memory, that Indian treaties and Indian sovereignty be honored.

When President Andrew Jackson ordered the Cherokee Nation off its Georgia homelands, the U.S. government signed a treaty with the Cherokees, promising them a $5 million payment upon successful removal west of the Mississippi.

No better symbol exists of the pain and suffering of the Trail Where They Cried than the Cherokee Rose(pictured at top of page). The mothers of the Cherokee grieved so much that the chiefs prayed for a sign to lift the mother’s spirits and give them strength to care for their children. From that day forward, a beautiful new flower, a rose, grew wherever a mother’s tear fell to the ground. The rose is white, for the mother’s tears. It has a gold center, for the gold taken from the Cherokee lands, and seven leaves on each stem that represent the seven Cherokee clans that made the journey. To this day, the Cherokee Rose prospers along the route of the “Trail of Tears”.

Military forts were already in place when theroads leading to those forts were being made more passable. Yet with no “removal treaty” known to Cherokees, settlers sarcastically made references to the military forts becoming the Cherokee’s new homes. Principle Chief John Ross was so alarmed by the forts, roads, and cruel teasing that he traveled all the way to Washington to express his grave concerns to Andrew Jackson.

Jackson hypocritically told them:

“You shall remain in your ancient land as long as grass grows and water runs.”

Principle Chief John Ross also tried desperately to escape the peril of Treaty of New Echota (the “removal treaty” which no true representative of the Cherokee Nation ever signed) for his people by sending a letter to the U.S. Senate and House, dated September 28, 1836:

Cherokee letter protesting the Treaty of New Etocha from Chief John Ross, “To the Senate and House of Representatives”

By the stipulations of this instrument, we are despoiled of our private possessions, the indefeasible property of individuals. We are stripped of every attribute of freedom and eligibility for legal self-defence. Our property may be plundered before our eyes; violence may be committed on our persons; even our lives may be taken away, and there is none to regard our complaints. We are denationalized; we are disfranchised. We are deprived of membership in the human family! We have neither land nor home, nor resting place that can be called our own. And this is effected by the provisions of a compact which assumes the venerated, the sacred appellation of treaty.

The U.S. Senate and House ignored his plea, and when 31 forts with adequate roads were in place to be transformed into prison, concentration, and death camps…the Cherokee received this letter from General Winfield Scott on May 10, 1838:

“Cherokees! The President of the United States has sent me with a powerful army, to cause you, in obedience to the treaty of 1835 [the Treaty of New Echota], to join that part of your people who have already established in prosperity on the other side of the Mississippi. Unhappily, the two years which were allowed for the purpose, you have suffered to pass away without following, and without making any preparation to follow; and now, or by the time that this solemn address shall reach your distant settlements, the emigration must be commenced in haste, but I hope without disorder.

Being Forced by the U.S. military to the internment, concentration, or death camps:

During the roundup intimidation and acts of cruelty at the hands of the troops, along with the theft and destruction of property by local residents, further alienated the Cherokees. Finally, Chief Ross appealed to President Van Buren to permit the Cherokees to oversee their own removal. Van Buren consented, and Ross and his brother Lewis administered the effort. The Cherokees were divided into 16 detachments of about 1,000 each.

“I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward the west….On the morning of November the 17th we encountered a terrific sleet and snow storm with freezing temperatures and from that day until we reached the end of the fateful journey on March the 26th 1839, the sufferings of the Cherokees were awful. The trail of the exiles was a trail of death. They had to sleep in the wagons and on the ground without fire. And I have known as many as twenty-two of them to die in one night of pneumonia due to ill treatment, cold and exposure…”

Private John G. Burnett

Captain Abraham McClellan’s Company,

2nd Regiment, 2nd Brigade, Mounted Infantry

Cherokee Indian Removal 1838-39

The military forts which were transformed into prison, concentration, and death camps were naturally armed with rifle towers and weaponry.1100 Cherokee were held as prisoners for almost 6 months at FORT HETZEL with no restroom facilities and little nourishment.

Starvation is a severe reduction in vitamin, nutrient, and energy intake, and is the most extreme form of malnutrition. In humans, prolonged starvation (in excess of 1-2 months) causes permanent organ damage and will eventually result in death.

I would be tempted to say that the soldiers intentionally fed the Cherokee less in order to alleviate sanitation problems, if it weren’t for the facts that several Cherokee died in the internment camps and on the Trail of Tears, due to a murderous philosophy:

Eugenics is a new term for an old phenomena which asserts that Indian people should be exterminated because they are an inferior race of people. Jefferson’s suggestion to pursue the Indians to extermination fits well into the eugenistic vision. In David Stannard’s study American Holocaust, he writes: “had these same words been enunciated by a German leader in 1939, and directed at European Jews, they would be engraved in modern memory. Since they were uttered by one of America’s founding fathers, however…they conveniently have become lost to most historians in their insistent celebration of Jefferson’s wisdom and humanity.” Roosevelt feared that American upper classes were being replaced by the “unrestricted breeding” of inferior racial stocks, the “utterly shiftless”, and the “worthless.”

The soldiers must have wanted them dead, for transferring dead bodies out of the internment camps and disposing of them must have been more inconvenient, than giving a prisoner a shovel to cover up feces, while they also died of diseases.

Having given Wilma Mankiller’s book away last summer, I think an earlier paragraph from my last diary referred to what occurred at Fort New Echota (at least), because the Cherokee were supposed to have been given corn, I remember:

Fort New Echota (Fort Wool):

General Scott was shocked during a trip to inspect Fort New Echota when he overheard members of The Guard say that they would not be happy until all Cherokee were dead. As a result, he issued meticulous orders on conduct and allowed actions during the action. Troops were to treat tribal members “with kindness and humanity, free from every strain of violence.” Each Cherokee was to receive meat and flour or corn regardless of age. Scott’s orders were disobeyed by most troops that were not directly under his control.NEW ECHOTA

The reader needs to understand that the Cherokee are a matriarchal society. Plainly put: the clan mother can trump the chief, women choose HER mate based on HIS cooking skills, and a man knew he was divorced if all his things were outside when he got home. So when the soldiers raped the women in the prison camps and on the Trail of Tears, they raped the tribe’s leaders as well. It was about taking away power. When the soldiers passed the women around like whiskey bottles raping them, it was about taking away power. When the soldiers scalped the women’s genitalia and wore their vaginas on their hats, it was about raping power to the most excruciating degree imaginable. I think it’s common knowledge how soldiers identified “leaders” in concentration camps and killed them, in order to keep the hostages under control. Still, one hundred and fifty-one years later nuns are raped and tortured…

Last of all, what happened in Fort Cumming may be ambiguous, but let us assume the “horrors that occurred inside the walls” were similar and at least equal to the extermination via internment camps and relocation against the Cherokees that occurred at the other forts, if not worse.

They would lose their land 50 years later with the Land Run of 1889. While 12 groups traveled by wagon on land, Chief John Ross’s group traveled by water by boat.

Strong seasonal rain made the dirt roads too muddy to travel, their horses could not graze enough to be sustained, and hunting was scarce. The U.S. government gave them very little food to take. Even if they had been able to maintain their horses and wagons, they still would have had to walk across the frozen Mississippi or Ohio River, or be trapped in between them.

Looking across the river today, one can only imagine the suffering that was taking place more than 150 years ago. Disrespectfully uprooted, homeless, they were embarking on a long journey in worn-out moccasins in the unforgiving dead of winter. Enduring river crossings, ice floes and relentless winds, they had only a blanket for warmth – if they were lucky. You imagine huddling around a fire, comforting your mother while she gets weaker and weaker … wondering, as she, when the suffering would end, and whether she would even live to see it.

I forgot that was why they walked with little or no shoes across jagged ice and snow for miles upon miles. You only get that at the museum, because there is a large approximately 6 x 4 picture of the Mississippi River in the winter covered in snow with jagged ice. I don’t know how as many survived as they did; nearly 2000 Cherokee died on the Trail Of Tears. The least number of reported total deaths is 4000, combining the deaths at the internment camps. The greatest estimated number is 8000.

Two-thirds of the ill-equipped Cherokees were trapped between the ice-bound Ohio and Mississippi Rivers during January. Although suffering from a cold, Quatie Ross, the Chief’s wife, gave her only blanket to a child.

“Long time we travel on way to new land. People feel bad when they leave Old Nation. Women cry and make sad wails, Children cry and many men cry…but they say nothing and just put heads down and keep on go towards West. Many days pass and people die very much.”

Recollections of a survivor:

She died of pneumonia at Little Rock. Some drank stagnant water and succumbed to disease. One survivor told how his father got sick and died; then, his mother; then, one by one, his five brothers and sisters. “One each day. Then all are gone.”

The last things I remember about going through the exhibit are the stories constantly being told through audio with representative statues. Voices are heard over each other, yet surrounding voices are soft enough to hear the one you’re currently at with clarity.

The soldiers forced the Cherokees to abandon their dead at the side of the road.

Amidst the surrounding voices in the museum was the voice of a Cherokee survivor expressing how her grandfather died. Her grandfather had to sneak away for a couple days to hunt for food, so that she and others could live. The few soldiers wouldn’t notice, apparently. She tells how as a little girl, she knelt beside him as he died. What I recall the most was her saying, “Grandfather, Grandfather?” I think a soldier hit him, but I can’t exactly recall. She had to just keep walking.

An elder once told me how some still walk the Trail Of Tears, to remember and honor their ancestors by their graves of stones. “But it takes about 6 months to do it,” he said. I heard another elder tell a group about his family’s forced relocation, “When my relative’s relatives died, they buried them, picked up their pipes, and moved on.”

Nearly one century and a half after the death of Roman Nose, Apostle Jay Swallow is on the War Council, has accepted the apology from the United States on behalf of all Tribal Nations, wars against evil, possesses medicine to make rain, and has divine authority to commit cultural genocide.

To accomplish the next phase of the Lordâ€™s assignment to free our state and region from the reproach of alignment with Stonehenge and the Baal structures, a war council of apostolic and prophetic leaders was convened. These leaders all carry unique and specific anointings of authority to deal with land issues, particularly in this territory. The War Council included: Ap. Jay & Joan Swallow, Ap. John Benefiel, Ap. Negiel Bigpond, Ap. Diane Buker (FL), Ap. Billy Joe & Ruthie Young (MS), Ap. Jacquie Tyre, Ap. Venessa Battle, Ap. Bradley White, Ap. Mark Hawkins, and apostolic intercessor, Deborah Landwerlen.

Apostle Jay Swallow was instrumental in relieving the historical trauma and grief from all American Indians.

“Apostle Jay Swallow accepted the apology from Sen. Brownback on behalf of Native Americans.” In fact, him doing so stopped the dominant culture from further encroaching on sacred sites, fixed the voting problems on all reservations, halted the teen suicide epidemic, stopped violence against Native American women in its tracks, and began the adherence to all treaties by the United States. It was a sincere apology, if there ever was one.

A few Native American and African American apostles in the movement accept the apologies on behalf of the ethnic groups they represent at ceremonies across the country. For instance, ICA Apostle Jay Swallow accepted the apology from Sen. Brownback on behalf of Native Americans at The Call Nashville 2007.

But more fabulously flabbergasting than Apostle Jay Swallow accepting the apology on behalf of all tribes, because that began the adherence to all treaties by the United States, is his rain medicine. During a séance I asked Sweet Medicine –

One story that I want to touch on and talk about is our Cheyenne prophet Sweet Medicine. Sweet Medicine was a very powerful person. He was a medicine man that was the one that gave us a lot of the teaching of the Cheyenne way of life-our traditional ceremonies, our language and our traditional laws that would govern us as people as we progressed in the future.

Sweet Medicine, (L ), is how you say his name. He was a culture hero among the Cheyenne. He started his life among the Cheyenne as a prophet at a very young age and he took refuge at the sacred mountain, (L), Bear Butte. That was where he was taught inside a cave and stayed there for a period of four years. While he was inside this cave he was given special instructions, teachings and gifts from the supernatural power of spirits. Those spirits are the ones that guided him and told him, “These are going to be the ways of life for the Cheyenne people”.

- why the water spirits answered Apostle Jay Swallow’s prayers for rain, but perhaps not other Cheyenne Medicine Men’s prayers. “They weren’t Christian,” Sweet Medicine said before vanishing to the other side.

Remember that last year at this time we were in a terrible drought? Eileen Vincent of City Reachers invited Dr. Jay Swallow to come to San Antonio to deal with the drought. Within just a few days it began to rain and has not stopped. The entire region has moved from exceptional drought to normal rainfall.

Dr. Jay has proved his authority over land issues – dealing with four things that defile the land: false worship, sexual immorality, broken covenants and the shedding of innocent blood. He has been called from Fiji to Hawaii, from Argentina to Canada and many points in between. We are honored that Dr. Jay has taken an interest in San Antonio.

…In a ceremony in Georgia, Apostle Jay Swallow also represented Native Americans and repented “for the iniquities of the ancient Cherokee people.” They claim that the results of these ceremonies have included miracles, like the end of droughts.

But getting the United States to finally do the right things and his supernatural rain making powers are overshadowed by his divinely authorized ability to commit cultural genocide against any Tribal Nation.

Many Transformation ceremonies, as depicted in the Transformation movies include claims of destruction of artifacts of the group – the apostles say they harbor demons. In another ceremony Apostle Jay Swallow led the smashing of vessels described as Native American pottery with graphics of the demons Baal and Leviathan.

Sarcasm aside, this is very serious. I’ve written about this before, but didn’t find any concrete occurrences of these “reconciliation events” where Native American artifacts were destroyed in the United States by connections with C. Peter Wagner until recently.

a) Apparently being directly mentored by none other than Mr. Joel’s Army himself (C. Peter Wagner) and actively teaching at Wagner’s ordination mill, Fuller Seminary and cross-promotion of Wagner’s and Warren’s material by the two.

At the 50 State Tour gathering, Chuck asked Dr. Swallow to remind him of what he asked God for when he went to Plymouth Rock. Dr. Swallow replied “I asked the Lord for forgiveness for Native Tribes building resistance against the gospel, and I ask Him to visit our tribes one more time.”

and he is the one who “led the smashing of vessels described as Native American pottery with graphics of the demons Baal and Leviathan.”

I shudder to think of other possible sacred artifacts and objects he may have access to and destroy.

The extent to which a Nation denies the genocide it has committed is a measure of that Nation’s social conscience. The social conscience of the United States is infected with numerous rationalizations that keep the dark light from shining. Federal and state institutions are named after mass murderers, and the land tells a story of massacres and atrocities that occurred. But the truth is not forgotten, it is denied.

8. DENIAL is the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile.

The term “redskins” actually refers to the Indian skins and body parts that bounty hunters had to show in order to receive payment for killing Indians, the National Congress of American Indians argued in a brief filed before the high court.

Leonard Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes. “Crow Dog.” pp. 6-7.

Only when we saw them building roads through our land, wagons at first, and then the railroad, when we watched them building forts, killing off all the game, committing buffalo genocide, and we saw them ripping up our Black Hills for gold, our sacred Paha Sapa, the home of the wakinyan, the thunderbirds, only then did we realize what they wanted was our land. Then we began to fight. For our earth. For our children. That started what the whites call the Great Indian Wars of the West. I call it the Great Indian Holocaust.

Ideological reasons are a motive for denying genocide. For example, “A nation ashamed of its past will fear its future;” and, “Such attitudes, which dominate the councils of the elite, are the single greatest threat to our survival.” Does the dominant culture’s survival really depend on denying that “battles” were massacres and Hitler was inspired by “actual U.S. examples?”

And…quoting from Chapter 5 – The Earth Is Our Mother from the book The State of Native America, Genocide, Colonization and Resistance, edited by Annette Jaimes, ISBN 0-89608-424-9:

- snip -

..Even the the nazi tactic of concentrating ‘undesireables’ prior to their forced ‘relocation or reduction’ was drawn from actual U.S. examples, including internment of the Cherokees and other ‘Civilized Tribes’ during the 1830′s before the devastatingly lethal Trail of Tears was forced upon them, and the comparable experience of the Navajo people at the Bosque Redondo during the period 1864-68.

Of course the dominant culture’s survival does not really depend on denying that “battles” were massacres and Hitler was inspired by “actual U.S. examples.” Remembering the dominant culture is a mindset, at least one author and possibly his readers do feel some sort of survival instinct in connection with their genocide denial. We’ll see those specific examples shortly. But we also know there are economic considerations, namely being held accountable, that motivate some to deny genocide.

Newspapers of the day publicized bounty notices on current “uprisings.” A 1922 article in the Rocky Mountain News reported a $25 reward for those who defeated “efforts to sign the roads into the Navajo reservation … The redskins are said to tear out or carry away all sign-boards.”

The Rocky Mountain News had political and proprietary interests in the Colorado gold and in clearing the territory of Indians to get at it. The newspaper started a drumbeat against Cheyenne Dog Soldiers and other “hostiles” that culminated in the Sand Creek Massacre of a peace camp of Cheyenne elders, pregnant women and children on Nov. 29, 1864.

The News celebrated the “Battle” of Sand Creek, lauding the Colorado Volunteers’ “Bloody Thirdsters” as having “covered themselves with glory.” By contrast, the U.S. Army officers on site reported it as the Sand Creek “Massacre” and described the soldiers as “barbaric” and “covered with gore.”

Until now, we have discussed some “whys,” which can be simplified into ideological or economic reasons.

There are many other examples of denial by perpetrators who wish to escape negative reactions to their deeds. More troubling are the later denials by people not directly involved in the genocidal events but who appear to have ideological reasons for their denials.

But Michael Medved and Don Feder and give us some clear examples of genocide denial, in addition to labeling massacres as battles. Medved “Claim(s) that the deaths were inadvertent,” while expressing ideological reasons.

Moreover, the real decimation of Indian populations had nothing to do with massacres or military actions, but rather stemmed from infectious diseases that white settlers brought with them at the time they first arrived in the New World.

As a result of famine, migration, or disease, not because of willful murder.

Yes, 90% to 95% of villages were already depopulated because of disease, but that does not excuse the killers who exterminated the indigenous survivors.

In a different tone but still denying genocide, Feder ” Rationalize(s) the deaths as the result of tribal conflict, coming to the victims out of the inevitability of their history of relationships.” But Feder substitutes white encroachment for another tribe. He minimizes the Great Indian Holocaust, as Crow Dog calls it, as merely “every nation includes its share of invasions, dispossessions and injustices.” Next, he supplies his own ideological reasons for denying the genocide as previously mentioned.

5. Rationalize the deaths as the result of tribal conflict, coming to the victims out of the inevitability of their history of relationships.

This was a witty rejoinder to my observation that the history of every nation includes its share of invasions, dispossessions and injustices.

- snip -

Plymouth protesters insist that America was a tragic mistake, our history is ignoble and the only valid reason for our continued existence is to provide racial reparations. Such attitudes, which dominate the councils of the elite, are the single greatest threat to our survival.

The extent to which a Nation denies the genocide it has committed is a measure of that Nation’s social conscience. The social conscience of the dominant culture does not want to lose its power, so it restrains its own humanity with ideologies and anything that points the finger the other way.

Denial of genocide is the final stage of genocide. It is what Elie Wiesel has called a “double killing.” Denial murders the dignity of the survivors and seeks to destroy remembrance of the crime. In a century plagued by genocide, we affirm the moral necessity of remembering.

But the real power the dominant culture loses is the power to be caring human beings. Much more needs to be researched and written about this topic.

In less than 6 months we will embark on another historic journey — an event so great and much needed for all of America!

This is a 5,000+ mile Walk Across America to bring awareness of the devastating effects of diabetes and how it can be reversed by changing our entire diet and lifestyle! This disease is at epidemic levels across America, and throughout Indian Country.

We will hold community talks along the way about reversing diabetes, and heart disease. We will be advocating for major changes in our eating habits, while promoting beneficial exercise programs. Our goal will be to REVERSE DIABETES AND RAISE THE CONSCIOUS OF AMERICA THAT WE MUST HALT THE WORST DIET IN THE WORLD! Along both routes we will be launching a CLEAN UP MOTHER EARTH campaign, picking up trash along both routes!!

I did an Inipi (sweat ceremony) with a tribal member who had not been able to do the Inipi for a long time due to his diabetes. He looked like a new man afterwards. I have also done ceremony with various tribal members who have to take insulin during the ceremony and have something to keep their blood sugar level up. Ceremonies, you know those ceremonies that used to banned by the United States because of that religious bigotry that led to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978? But some say the Inipi was to make The People stronger and the seventh most sacred rite is a vision for an entire Nation. What could be more urgent overall –

We will hold community talks along the way about reversing diabetes, and heart disease. We will be advocating for major changes in our eating habits, while promoting beneficial exercise programs.

- since before we can help others, we must take care of ourselves? Read what I say next twice. That man I first mentioned who looked like a new man after the Inipi, adopted a girl he has to help take care of.

So, I have a question for our congressional representatives who hopefully see this. Do you care?

The rise in the minority population is due to recent sharp increases in minority births, especially among Hispanics, who accounted for more than half of total U.S. population gains last year. There are now roughly 9 births for every 1 death among Latinos, compared to a roughly one-to-one ratio for whites.

Some 64% of the nation’s Hispanic population are of Mexican origin (see table). Another 9% are of Puerto Rican origin, with about 3% each of Cuban, Salvadoran and Dominican origins. The remainder are of other Central American or South American origin, or of origin directly from Spain. About 7% are of unspecified national origins. It should be noted that these figures pertain to ethnic self-identification; the same dataset (abstracted from the 2007 American Community Survey) indicates that 60.2% of all Hispanic and Latino Americans were born in the United States.[38]

We will be leaving La Jolla (San Diego County), California on February 14, 2011 (Valentine’s Day – Heart Day) following a pipe ceremony, and other events, and entering Washington DC on July 8th, 2011 (Note: Facebook only allows events to be posted that are 4 months or less — this walk is actually about 5 months).

Southern Route:

California- Feb 14 – Feb 24

Arizona – Feb 24 – Mar 16

New Mexico – Mar 16 – Apr 6

Texas(panhandle) – April 6 – Apr 8

Oklahoma – Apr 8 – Apr28

Arkansas – Apr 28 – May 1

Louisiana – May 1 – May 17

Mississippi – May 17 – May 20

Alabama – May 20 – May 22

Florida – May 22 – June 12

Georgia – June 12 – June 19

South Carolina – June 19 – June 25

North Carolina – June 25 – July 2

Virginia – July 2 – July 8

The Longest Walk 3 is welcoming a NORTHERN ROUTE from Portland, Oregon to Washington DC!! Chris Fransisco will be leading this route. Please help support both routes. We Need Your Help!!

SEE UPDATE

Northern Route:

Oregon February 14 – March 3

Idaho March 3 – March23

Wyoming March 23 – April 5

Nebraska April 5 – April 19

Kansas April 19 – May 10

Missouri May 10 – May23

Illinois May 23 – Jun 1

Indiana June 1 – June 15

Ohio June 15 – June 25

West Virginia June 25 – July 1

Virginia July 1 – July 8

STATE COORDINATORS ARE NEEDED IN THESE STATES. If you or someone you know is willing to make a commitment of this type, please contact our National Coordinator, Goodz Cloud (also on Facebook) or myself. Please let us know as soon as possible since we have less than 6 months left!!

—-

There will be a Mid-walk break from May 11 – 17th, while we’re in Louisiana for the walkers to travel back home, or help the communities in that state.

We also welcome a Link run coming in from Rapid City, South Dakota, meeting us in Oklahoma. For more info on this, please contact Tokala Banks.

Each day the walkers will walk a total of 15 – 25 miles, and the runners will run between 50 – 100 miles. This event has a ZERO TOLERANCE POLICY on DRUGS/ALCOHOL — this will be your only warning.

We are currently in need of local event planners, volunteers, supporters, and musicians willing to play benefit concerts along the route. If you are interested in making a commitment of this type, or know of anyone, please contact us via email or phone. We will then put you in contact with one of our State Coordinators in your area.

We have only 6 months before the start of this historic event. Our route is taking us along much of the southern coastline. We have and will address any needs while the walk is in your state, with adequate notice. So please let us know as-soon-as-possible.

This is a 5,000+ mile Walk Across America to bring awareness of the devastating effects of diabetes and how it can be reversed by changing our entire diet and lifestyle! This disease is at epidemic levels across America, and throughout Indian Country. LW III will hold community talks along the way about reversing diabetes, and heart disease. They will be advocating for major changes in eating habits, while promoting beneficial exercise programs. The goal is to REVERSE DIABETES AND RAISE THE CONSCIOUS OF AMERICA THAT WE MUST HALT THE WORST DIET IN THE WORLD! The Longest Walk 3 is welcoming a NORTHERN ROUTE from Portland, Oregon to Washington DC!!

The Forgotten People invite you to a press conference at the Veterans Park in Window Rock on Wednesday, August 4, 2010 at 11:00 AM (DST) to announce filing a major lawsuit to get answers about the Navajo Rehabilitation Trust Fund monies to benefit the victims and survivors of the “Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute.”

The Forgotten People have been cheated and are taking things into their own hands. We want to know what the stewards of our money did with our money and where it is. These are our funds, set aside by Congress for our benefit. The Freeze has been lifted. While we wait and nothing happens, our people are living in sub-standard, and overcrowded housing, without access to safe drinking water on land contaminated by uranium and coal mining.

Vine Deloria Jr. in God Is Red uses the self explanatory phrases, “spiritual owners of the land” and “political owners of the land.” Now, it is the “political owners of the land” who have taken tribal lands by conquest and yet distort the historical record.

Three members from the Hopi Tribe arrived to give their testimonies as show support for their neighbors, The Dine. Their presence dispelled the public relations myth that the traditional Hopi and the Dine are involved in a Range War.”

At the present time we face the danger that we might lose our land entirely. Through the influence of the United States Government, some people of Hopi ancestry have organized what they call the Hopi Tribal Council, patterned according to a plan devised by the Government, for the purpose of negotiating directly with the Government and with private businesses. They claim to act in the interests of the Hopi people, despite the fact that they ignore the existing traditional leaders, and represent only a small minority of the people of Hopi blood. Large areas of our land have been leased, and this group is now accepting compensation from the Indian Claims Commission for the use of 44,000,000 acres of Hopi land. This is in error, for we laid our aboriginal claim to all of this land long before the newcomers ever set foot upon it. We do not recognize man-made boundaries. We true Hopi are obligated to the Great Spirit never to cut up our land, nor to sell it. For this reason we have never signed any treaty or other document releasing this land. We have protested all these moves, but to no avail.

Now this Tribal Council was formed illegally, even according to whiteman’s laws. We traditional leaders have disapproved and protested from the start. In spite of this they have been organized and recognized by the United States Government for the purpose of disguising its wrong-doings to the outside world. We do not have representatives in this organization, nor are we legally subject to their regulations and programs. We Hopi are an independent sovereign nation, by the law of the Great Spirit, but the United States Government does not want to recognize the aboriginal leaders of this land. Instead, he recognizes only what he himself has created out of today’s children in order to carry out his scheme to claim all of our land.

Because of this, we now face the greatest threat of all, the actual loss of our cornfields and gardens, our animals and wild game, and our natural water supply, which would put an end to the Hopi way of life. At the urging of the Department of the Interior of the United States, the Tribal Council has signed several leases with an outside private enterprise, the Peabody Coal Company, allowing them to explore our land for coal deposits, and to strip-mine the sacred mesas, selling the coal to several large powerplants. This is part of a project intended to bring heavy industry into our area against our wishes. We know that this will pollute the fields and grazing lands and drive out the wildlife. Great quantities of water will be pumped from beneath our desert land and used to push coal through a pipe to a powerplant in another state (Nevada). The loss of this water will affect our farms as well as the grazing areas of the animals. It also threatens our sacred springs, our only natural source of water, which we have depended upon for centuries.

So, the “spiritual owners of the land,” or “the side of the executioners -”

“The BIA Indian police are intensifying their daily presence and intimidations. They have graded the main dirt roads that allows them to be on constant patrol..”I think that they will be rounding up Dineh-owned cattle and horses. It is pretty likely that there will be livestock impoundments or confiscation… Indian police operating out of the Hopi reservation do not have any real commanding-authority..”

John McCain in on the record as saying, “the reason why the office of Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation was created originally, was because of the belief that the BIA couldn’t handle it.” Interesting, because the beginning of this video shows the BIA impounding cattle.

executive branch the Office of Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation which

shall be under the direction of the Commissioner on Navajo and Hopi

Relocation (hereinafter in this subchapter referred to as the

“Commissioner”).

- snip -

(1)(A) Except as otherwise provided by the Navajo and Hopi Indian

Relocation Amendments of 1988, the Commissioner shall have all the

powers and be responsible for all the duties that the Navajo and Hopi

Indian Relocation Commission had before November 16, 1988.

Oh look, “The Commissioner, no the Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation office, no, the U.S. government with McCain at the helm in the relevant timeline, the U.S. Mining company security personnel, Peabody Coal’s bulldozers, armed rangers, and the BIA shall have all the powers and be responsible for all the duties that the Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation Commission ??????? had before November 16, 1988.”

Confused yet? That’s what this “legislation” was supposed to do. It was supposed to hide McCain’s involvement to steal land, and the violations of human rights remains hidden as well to the overall public. “In 1996, Congress passed a law endorsing a 75-year lease arrangement that would allow a few of the families to remain as tenants on the land. The law sanctions the relocation of families not eligible for these leases and forces the families who sign the leases to live without benefit of civil and religious rights exercised by other Americans” the UN told us. Also, PL 104-301 tells us that “the number of homesites available for lease is 112,” yet adds, “additional homesites may be made available subject to agreement between the Hopi Tribe and homesite applicant.” Quite generous in light of the forced relocation of at least (edited in) 10,000 Navajos. One forced relocation is a tragedy, but apparently 10,000 or more is just a statistic. The UN also told us about the loss of voting rights, the physical harassment of elders, intimidation tactics, that armed rangers visited elders at their homes and stole their property, and that their sacred sites were bulldozed – including their graveyards.

On June 27, 2002, the US Supreme Court rendered a verdict on a case brought by Lindsay Earls, a member of the Cherokee Nation, whom I refer to as a great American heroine. Even though she is an Oklahoma resident, her case received a great deal of coverage in my region (Vermont/New Hampshire border) as she was by then a student at Dartmouth College (whose medical center I am employed at).

I wrote about this several years ago; alas, several links which I cite here no longer work. But here first is her story of courage, followed by what she is doing today.

In 1999, Lindsay Earls was a 16 year-old junior at Tecumseh High School (about 40 miles southeast of Oklahoma City) and was a self-described “goody two-shoes”; being a member of an academic quiz team and a choir singer. One day she was called out of choir practice to submit to a random urine test for drugs; based on a 1998 school board policy that required all students in grades 7 – 12 to submit to a urine test before joining any extracurricular activities.

In order to preserve her right to participate, she complied with the drug testing (and always passed) but filed a lawsuit claiming that the policy violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable search/seizure. Her position was denied by the district court, then supported by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and then reached the US Supreme Court in March, 2002.

Lindsay Earls had reason for hope, since the most relevant Supreme Court precedent had to do with a 1995 case called Vernonia School District vs. Acton. This involved a school district that had experienced problems with drugs (performance-enhancing in addition to recreational use, if I recall correctly) on its athletic teams. It instituted a policy that called for random drug-testing of student-athletes only (due to the danger involved in contact sports). Though I regret anytime that we move away from probable cause to guilty-until-proven-innocent: that ruling at least seemed to have been decided judiciously.

By contrast, the Tecumseh policy was not based on a response to drug usage among students involved in extra-curricular activities, and it applied to members of, say, the debate team as well.

Lindsay Earls endured some rather snide remarks from people in her home state who trotted out the old police-state-like “if you have nothing to hide…..” argument, despite her passing the test. Particularly telling was this quote from someone in Congress:

Indiana Rep. Mark Souder (R) said the court’s ruling should drive an expansion of testing nationwide and will not hurt the privacy of students. The testing “is only burdensome on those who want to waste their lives getting high,” he said.

She also had to endure this from Justice Anthony Kennedy whom I regarded as a genuine hero himself in “Lawrence vs. Texas”:

Justice Anthony Kennedy drew gasps from the courtroom audience when he appeared to personally attack plaintiff Lindsay Earls. Kennedy posed a hypothetical with one school that had drug testing and one that did not — “the druggie school,” he called it. “Every parent” would want to send his children to the first school”, Kennedy told plaintiff’s attorney Graham Boyd of the ACLU’s Drug Policy Litigation Project, but then added dismissively, “Well, perhaps not your client”.

On that fateful day of June 27, 2002, the US Supreme Court overturned the Court of Appeals case and ruled against Lindsay Earls by a 5-4 margin. This ruling sadly seemed to up-the-ante for the guilty-until-proven-innocent standard, as the court seemed to dismiss the fact that the high school in question had no history of drug use among those involved in extra-curricular activities, and now stretched hard to say that anyone who did participate had no right to expect privacy.

One wonders if a future court will take the next logical step and endorse testing for all students (on a loco-parentis basis). Paul Clement – then the deputy solicitor general for the Bush administration – felt school-wide drug testing would be constitutional and has said so in court. Yet as a commentator for the Daily Texan noted at the time (sadly which is no longer on-line), “But obviously he’ll settle for extracurricular activities now, since it makes for an easier case“.

If there are saving graces to this story (besides the courage of this young woman) it would be:

(a) Many school districts have not adopted these policies – some doubt their effectiveness, while the majority have decided the cost to be too much. And perhaps in part because …..

(b) Those authorities realize that a 5-4 majority may fall some day; perhaps a future justice may echo the words of Justice Kennedy when he famously declared that the precedent that he voted to overturn in Lawrence vs. Texas was, “wrongly decided then, and it is still wrong“, and

(c) Some conservatives felt uncomfortable by the decision, also – consider these words from Debra Saunders – first written in a Town Hall(!) column entitled “Want to join the chess club? Pee In a Cup”:

Liberals and conservatives should be outraged at last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of an Oklahoma school district’s mandatory drug testing policy for students involved in extracurricular activities. That 5-to-4 decision, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, was an assault on parental rights. Since drugs were involved, the justices felt free to indulge in judicial activism — something conservatives such as Thomas are supposed to abhor.

Finally, this story has a happy ending in that Lindsay Earls not only is a 2005 graduate of Dartmouth College, but for a few years held a position of responsibility at the Indigenous Democratic Network (as she no longer works there, this is no longer on-line):

Lindsay Earls, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, hails from Tecumseh, Oklahoma. While at Dartmouth, Lindsay was active in Dartmouth Civil Liberties Union and in DREAM – a Vermont-based mentoring program. Lindsay has been a recipient of the ACLU’s Youth Activism Award and the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union’s Bill of Rights Award.

Currently she is a law student at the University of Tulsa, and this past spring gave an address sponsored by the Oklahoma ACLU on her case.

I was originally tempted to entitle this essay (Native) American heroine …. but upon reflection, I think I have the title just as it should be.

A unique ministry of spiritual warfare through anointed Native American cultural expressions of worship: a blending of Native and contemporary Christian that sets the captives free. We invite musicians (guitar, bass, drums, Indian drum and singers), and dancers to join us in ministry. Four Square Affiliation

traditional way. When he became a young man he was invited to participate in the Sun Dance, this was a great honor and his family had suffered many losses that year. His heart was very heavy from the trauma and so he felt it was his duty and it was important for him to make the sacrifice. During the ceremony he was pierced and after many hours he was getting weak. As he was dancing he looked at the center pole and he saw Jesus. He was taken by His look and the Lord said to him, “What are you doing?” Bruce replied, “I am suffering for my people, why do you ask Lord?” Jesus replied, “You don’t have to do this any more, I have already suffered for your people.” Since that time my friend has been serving the Lord and he has a powerful testimony.

Furthermore, “serving the Lord” also takes the form of “dismantling of the cement tomb over the mass grave” at Wounded Knee.

Ministering to Native people has exposed a gaping hole in the soul of Indian Country. This festering wound is a result of the massacre at Wounded Knee in South Dakota and other atrocities. The Spirit of God has given me a prophetic picture of the healing of Wounded Knee and the massacer site; including the dismantling of the cement tomb over the mass grave and restoring the site to an original earthen mound with wild flowers and prairie grass and a lodge pole burying scaffold, in addition, the Holy Spirit has given us access to certain items that I believe God will use to bring healing to Wounded Knee.

- huge snip -

The partnership of Native Ministers with the American Church will ignite revival and thrust the Body of Christ into all the world ending with the salvation of Israel.

The Rapture’s meaning has transformed here. No longer an event where the elect vanish prior to God unleashing his wrath, now the elect shall form the Body of Christ and clear the path for the Lamb with blood.

Introduction: Spiritual warfare principles in the practices of Native Americans, life of a warrior, preparation – body, soul, spirit. Crazy Horse, Geronimo, Indian medicine – Spiritual warfare can only be waged with the anointing of the Holy Spirit

The Gospel contains a beautiful story; that is, that the very Son of God loved each and every one enough to die for them. Countless lives have been made better believing that, for there isn’t enough love in this world. But that is no excuse to commit cultural genocide, desecrate graves, and cross the line over into redemptive violence. These are the Christian Fascists, and as we have seen with the Christian Militias, they must be dealt with by using the full spectrum of federal law enforcement at the appropriate time.

I dreamed I was dead and talking to your spirit at the tree of life Mr. President. You were somewhat annoyed at having been summoned by greater powers than you, but you listened and were very considerate of hearing what I had to say. I didn’t need to tell you all the details of what you are considering signing, and I understood your complex predicament. I told you that you had a choice to make since most the remaining natural resources of the Earth Mother are on Indigenous lands, and you are president of all the people of this country. I told you I pitied your predicament and would not want it for myself. When respecting one’s sacred lands means compromising the survival of another, how do you decide between what is right and necessary but evil?

Barack Obama might support the United Nations Declaration of Indigenous Rights, First Nations leaders said after meeting with the president-elect´s Indian advisers on Thursday.

- snip –

Around 50 indigenous representatives from the Americas attended the special session Dec. 9-12 at OAS headquarters in the Simón Bolívar Room.

You know you cannot damage the land without damaging The People, and you know we cannot change fast enough to reverse the course our Earth Mother is on, much less change from a carbon based economy to a green economy over night. And how sad you must feel in your heart sometimes Mr. President – because while the answers are right in front of us – it is greed that in the end will kill us all. It is greed that continues to kill our relatives in the water and who fly above it – not the oil. The water of life, enough for many Nations, has become death to those relatives and ways of life that once depended on it. As we talked Mr. President, you knew those things, but you had never thought about what I said next.

There are those of us who know we are American Indian, but who don’t know what language we speak. We don’t know who are clans are anymore. We can not go to all of the graves of our ancestors to pay respect or mourn, for we will never know who they were. We are the result of the Final Solution. And the primary reason is that our ancestor’s land was stolen from them, and their languages were intentionally stamped out. While it is true that languages have survived, that specific lineage in us is gone forever. And you know, Mr. President, that respecting all the unique sovereignty of all the Indigenous Peoples is the core of the UN Declaration. Therefore, I asked you questions to help you relate to the issues at hand.

Would you like it if your daughters did not know who their father was? Would you like it if your daughters did not know the language you spoke, but had been forced into speaking a different tongue for the sake of Manifest Destiny?

Those of us whose specific lineage is gone forever have relatives from many Nations, but we won’t even be a memory seven generations from now as being from that specific lineage. Mr. President, and I can only speak for myself, don’t let my present become any one else’s future.

On November 5, 2009 at a historic summit in Washington, DC hosted by President Barack Obama, Chairman Joe Kennedy – Timbisha Shoshone of the Western Shoshone Nation, delivered a message on behalf of the Nations and Pueblos of Indigenous Peoples of North America calling for immediate action by the present US administration in affirmation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

This call to implement the UNDRIP after centuries of colonization and injustice, institutes a new systemic standard that allows for complementary readjustment among entities of the government states and the Nations and Pueblos of Indigenous Peoples globally, normalizing peaceful relations and creating partnerships based on mutual respect and cooperation.

Rev. Dodson: Representing the Indian Territory is Mrs. Anna Bennett of Muskogee.

(Durant presents Mrs. Bennett to Jones, bows, and steps back.)

Mrs. Bennett: I will. And to you I present my hand and my fortunes, convinced that your love is genuine and sincere.

Dodson: Do you, Mr. Oklahoma Territory, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forth, in union as the State of Oklahoma?

To bring this to a close, all of the tribes experienced a Trail of Tears due to the forced relocations; some were more or less severe. However, the tears did not end with the forced relocations. The cruel mock wedding ceremony caused tears; being shut out of the democratic process caused more tears after the denial of duel joint statehood, as did the Dawes Act and all the racism that accompanied it. Simultaneously, the Indian Boarding Schools were working their “solution,” which would continue until approximately 1970, while the forced sterilizations would work their “solution” and end in the mid 1970′s. No Indian, no “problem” for the whites who cut the Indians out of life, democracy, or both.

So, how else would one help eliminate another’s political influence? Don’t let them teach their children the truth, or anyone else’s. Now, after over a century, there is finally an educational tool to teach the truth about American Indians in Oklahoma.

As a former constituent and soon to be Oklahoma resident and constituent once more, please allow me to respectfully explain why you should sign the Indian Education Advisory Council bill (HB2929).

PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO ALL YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS ON YOUR EMAIL LISTS:

We need to get supporters to contact Governor Henry’s office. As of Friday, June 4th, he still had not signed the bill. We only have 15 days from when it was sent to the Gov’s office for him to sign it.

Please support the bill by sending Gov. Henry emails via web form at:

http://www.governor.state.ok.u… (Click on the link “Message to the Governor”). You will fill out the form on line and submit your message to the Governors office. AND/OR call his office 405-521-2342 stating that you support him signing HB2929 (establishment of Indian Education Advisory Council).

Mvto, Brenda Golden on behalf of

Society to Preserve Indigenous Rights & Indigenous Traditions

I worked in education for nearly nine years as an Oklahoma resident, and I can tell you with authority that racism against the American Indian exists in Oklahoma schools, and why.

Racism is based on ignorance and Oklahoma has a tragic history of institutionalized racism against the American Indian. My grandmother on my father’s side had the only bar in town that served Indians. The Indians weren’t “good enough” to drink with the whites. So let me tell you how I heard first hand how Indians still aren’t “good enough” in the public school system.

- “I know an Indian. They get that check for $900 every month; I know what that’s about, uh huh.”

What “that’s about,” Governor Henry, is Oklahoma’s utter failure to educate its students about American Indian history. There isn’t even a copy of Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee sold at the Oklahoma Historical Society bookstore, nor of that genre of text last I was there. It’s primarily cultural books. But that’s easier to read than thinking of this driving down Sheridan Street.

Dee Brown. “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” P. 169.

In his official report over the “savage butchers” and “savage bands of cruel marauders,” General Sheridan rejoiced that he had “wiped out Black Kettle, a worn – out and worthless old cipher.”

He then stated that he had promised Black Kettle sanctuary if he would come into a fort before military operations began. “He refused,” Sheridan lied, “and was killed in the fight.”

“The only good Indians I ever saw were dead (General Sheridan)” street.

Perhaps, Governor, occurrences such the following are due to faulty beliefs.

“We called him Tonto, and when he cut it off – we called him White Boy.”

“The Indians gave up their land willingly.”

“The Indians were freed before the Blacks were.”

And those faulty beliefs need to be corrected with the Indian Education Advisory Council bill (HB2929). Or, Governor Henry, things can just remain -

- as they are.

I call on you, Governor Henry, to sign the Indian Education Advisory Council bill. American Indian history should be “good enough” for Oklahoma.

In that speech, it was revealed that this is the first time that a state in the US is being held accountable for the actions of its leadership regarding Native Americans. That fact drew much attention the week of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. The Sand Hill Tribe is the last continuously operating Lenape tribe left in the state of New Jersey. It is one of the last “first contact” tribes left on the Eastern seaboard. The stakes are enormous.

When Chairman Holloway met with the Special Rapporteur, he was informed that the UN is willing to represent Chairman Holloway and his Tribe – The NJ Sand Hill Band of Lenape and Cherokee Indians, and will reach out to the US Leadership to set up a meeting to negotiate a settlement. The Rapporteur also promised to represent Chairman Yonaguska Holloway and his tribe, if necessary, at the Hague.

This story, which we have been trying to tell for the past 2 years is finally big enough to get the press it deserved all along. This case could go all the way to the World Court if the Federal Government continues to deny justice by delaying it indefinitely. According to Chairman Holloway, “Now the case in in the hands of the world. We will see what the world thinks.”

As a previous editor of the Classic Progressive Historians, I was trying to get a historian I had met on line to post there. He was in Mexico and as we corresponded, he told me that at least 80% of “Mexicans” are Lipan Apache. Who is Arizona wanting to “send back to where they came from?”

The privileges of citizenship were slow to come for Indians while the responsibilities came right away. It’s hard not to think of the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, some of the toughest combat of WWII. The Navajo code talkers served though that campaign at a time when Arizona was still denying them the vote. Now, it appears that Arizona Indians who visit the cities will have to be careful about being brown in a no-brown zone, whether or not they are veterans.

The man talked about how his people were forced into speaking Spanish as the result of the Spanish Conquest, and that they were trying to get their language back.

This law is not aimed at Europeans without papers, even though by its plain words a German tourist could be locked up for leaving her Phoenix hotel without her passport. This law is aimed at Mexicans and the blood of Mexicans is primarily American Indian.

In December 1511 Fray Antonio Montesinos preached a sermon at Santo Domingo in which he warned the conquistadors they were all in mortal sin because of the cruel way they were oppressing innocent people. He asked them,

The US made new threats about the condemnation and seizure of Lipan Apache lands in Texas for the US/Mexico border wall, as the abuses of Indigenous Peoples in the borderzone continues unabated. President Obama continues the genocidal borderland policies of the Bush administration.

The Lipan Apache announcement came this week at the same time that a US Border Agent shot and killed a man, Solis Palma, 28, throwing rocks east of Douglas, Arizona. The practice of US Border Agents murdering rock throwers mirrors the genocidal practices of Israeli soldiers shooting rock throwers, including children, at the border of Palestine.

The Lipan Apache in Texas have been targeted for the seizure of their land, while wealthy white land owners in the Texas borderlands benefit from US white supremacist policy.

The state of Arizona has a leadership problem, but that doesn’t mean that all of the residents share their view, or want to be hurt by their actions.

How many Native Americans and businesses will be hurt by the proposed boycott of Arizona?

I haven’t been to Supai, but tourists come from all over the world to visit their village and stay at their camps.

Canyon de Chelly brings many visitors who shop at stores in towns like Chinle, and you can buy jewelery and peridot on the San Carlos Reservation, but I doubt that many small towns or tribes are celebrating in today’s economy.

There are many old mining towns like Jerome where progressives moved in and opened restaurants, bicycle shops, and other businesses that benefit from tourism. Those dollars help the entire region, but I doubt that many are celebrating today.

Choose your targets wisely, don’t hurt those who are just trying to make a living.

It was one of those moments in which fury against the rich went further than leaders like Otis wanted. Could class hatred be focused against the pro- British elite, and deflected from the nationalist elite?

Or today, the GOP might ask, “Could class hatred be focused against a black president, and deflected from us, who support Wall Street and Blackwater?” They’ve done an outstanding job. So the primarily Caucasian teabaggers should be upset, but don’t they have a right to be as angry as they think they do.

“The Choctaw experienced the first concentration camps,” a Choctaw man said while lecturing.

He was formerly an employee of the federal government and it was an educational setting. What’s that conspiracy theory FEMA is being used to round up people into concentration camps? This country never put Caucasians in concentration camps. They put the American Indian in concentration camps, the African into living conditions wherein they would barely survive, and they “brought” women over just to reproduce. Death, blood money, and gratuitous sex: the tools of the historical White Man.

“This agency participated in the ethnic cleansing that befell the Western tribes,” Gover said. “It must be acknowledged that the deliberate spread of disease, the decimation of the mighty bison herds, the use of the poison alcohol to destroy mind and body, and the cowardly killing of women and children made for tragedy on a scale so ghastly that it cannot be dismissed as merely the inevitable consequence of the clash of competing ways of life.”

Archaeological evidence suggests that aside from nails and door hardware, the Madisons provided little resources for slaves to build these simple structures. The homes of the field slaves stand in marked contrast to the enslaved domestics’ homes directly in sight of the Montpelier mansion.

Slaveholders thought of the men, women, and children they held in bondage as property. Masters and mistresses considered the slave’s most important relationship to be that maintained with an owner. They worried that children reared to respect other authority figures, such as parents, might question the legitimacy of the southern social order, which granted slaveholders sweeping power over the people they held in bondage.

It seems that their (women’s) physical characteristics became a convenience for men, who could use, exploit, and cherish someone who was at the same time servant, sex mate, companion, and bearer-warden-teacher of his children.

I forgot to mention one tool other than death, blood money, and gratuitous sex: lies.

I can’t begin to describe what I went through learning in my mid 30s that I was a little over 1/6 Native American, and I had already begun following those ways. But here are some lies they had to have told my ancestors who lost their heritage, thus my specific heritage, to being Christianized.

They would’ve told them their religion wasn’t good enough, that they were going to hell unless they “accepted Jesus.”

They would’ve told them to go to the cities and be “normal.”

They would’ve told them they could stay on their lands after promising to not take anymore, but they used pen and ink witchcraft.

They would’ve hunted them down like animals to steal the natural resources on it, while being convinced they weren’t human beings. O the joy that must have come when they were made “citizens” with the right to vote. Maybe they were slaves depending on their location.

I’ve felt angry, but I don’t project all of that onto present situations, and I don’t condone violence. I believe it was a Comanche man, who criticized young men wanting to go to war. He said his ancestor wore the War Bonnet, but refused to wear it again. He got sick of war.

Teabaggers in the violent mindset need an example of legitimate self defense.

The Germans ordered the Jewish “police” in the Warsaw ghetto to round up people for deportation. Approximately 300,000 men, women, and children were packed in cattle cars and transported to the Treblinka death camp where they were murdered. This left a Jewish population of between 55,000 and 60,000 in the ghetto.

In April 1943, the Jews learned the Germans planned to deport all the people who remained in the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka. A group of mostly young people formed an organization called the Z.O.B. (for the Polish name, Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, which means Jewish Fighting Organization). The Z.O.B., led by 23-year-old Mordecai Anielewicz, issued a proclamation calling for the Jewish people to resist going to the railroad cars.

In January 1943, Warsaw ghetto fighters fired upon German troops as they tried to round up another group of ghetto inhabitants for deportation. Fighters used a small supply of weapons that had been smuggled into the ghetto. After a few days, the troops retreated. This small victory inspired the ghetto fighters to prepare for future resistance.

Thus, teabaggers do have a right to be upset over being used and lied to by their party, but there it ends. Teabaggers have a right to be mad? Please. And their women are with the wrong party.

PINE RIDGE — Oglala Sioux Tribe President Theresa Two Bulls will declare a suicide state of emergency for Pine Ridge Indian Reservation during a news conference at 1 p.m. today.

I want to share a personal story, because I hope people contacting the White House will save lives by giving hope. How many, I don’t know. I wouldn’t share it unless I thought it would be helpful to others. Suffice it to say, hope through someone to talk to would’ve been the difference between a 20 gauge shotgun to my head or not at 17.

I was 17 years old and my codependence combined with normal adolescent neurosis and feelings of abandonment left me feeling absolutely hopeless. I was raised in a good family and we had a good house, but New Years Eve of ’87 found me calling suicide hotlines – but nobody answered.

I further spiraled into hopelessness thinking, “New Years Eve, they know it’s a night of higher suicide rates, that’s it.” I made the decision to end my life.

It was really a strange feeling going into my parent’s room, putting a shell in a 20 gauge shotgun with tears streaming down my face, and pointing it to my head. I had taken the safety off. I just wanted someone to help me and talk to me. Nonetheless, I put enough pressure on the trigger for it to go off, but I saw something out of the right corner of my right eye. The gun didn’t fire and I was amazed that it didn’t. I put it to my head again and these thoughts seemed to be streamed into my mind, “If you do this, you’re one selfish bastard.”

I put the gun up.

I sponsored someone 13 years later, and when he committed suicide via an overdose I understood why. However, many were at his funeral and I still remember thinking, “I wish you could have seen then how many people care now.”

From a MySpace bulletin:

Autumn TwoBulls: Take a Stand Against Poverty & Suicide in Lakota Country join us in Calling The White House ~202 456 1111Share

Today at 3:13pm

Autumn TwoBulls: Take a Stand Against Poverty & Suicide in Lakota Country join us in Calling The White House ~202 456 1111 This is the time when my people should be treated fair and with justice.

Support the Sweet Grass Suicide Provention Program here in Pine Ridge Reservation

This is an epmidemic among Lakota Country please give our Lakota Youth a Voice for Hope!

Follow -Up Call In to White House Tuesday March 2, 2010

Help bring a voice to the Lakota Nation in the matters Poverty and Suicide on the Pine Ridge Reservation/Contact White House

To Friends, Relations and supporters.,

Thank you for the overwhelming response to our White House Call In last Tuesday 2/16 and again on Friday.

Over the last while, you have seen and heard of the terrible situations and conditions on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Again, I am asking you to come make your voice be heard.Last Tuesday all of you overwhelmed the Comment line 202 456 1111.

On Tuesday, March 2, 2010, please take the time to call in again.We need to keep this subject on the President’s “Radar” and this is a way for us to be heard.

Tell President Obama of the awful conditions facing my people here on Pine Ridge. Tell him the Oglala Sioux Tribe Declared a State of Emergency on Suicide in December Remind him of the promises that he has made to the First Nations/Native American people. Promises waiting to be fulfilled.

When you call the comment line tell them about the grinding poverty rates, the 80% unemployment and the desperation that is leading so many of our people and youth to commite suicide. We are asking that Aide is brought to our Lakota Nation in these matters.

1: When you make your call, please be respectful

2: State in your call Why you are calling, i.e., Suicide and povertyon the Pine Ridge Reservation, etc

3: State that you would like to know what the President can do about this.

4: Remind respectfully that the President made promises to the First NationsNative American People during his campaign.

Help us to be heard again, we’ve only just begun use our voice.

Together we can make a difference for the people. One voice together, loud enough for the President to open his mind and his heart to my people, the Lakota Nation of Pine Ridge Reservation.

I am so grateful for the support in this effort to help Our Lakota Nation be heard. Lets work together as one voice

Pila Unyape, Wopila Tanka Echichiyape

Respectfully, Autumn Two Bulls

Oglala Lakota of Pine Ridge South Dakota

http: //www.whitehouse.gov/contact

PHONE THE WHITE HOUSE:

202 456 1111

Faced with rash of suicides, OST President Two Bulls declares an emergency

www. rapidcityjournal.com

In an emotional appeal to the people of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Oglala Sioux Tribe President Theresa Two Bulls declared a state of emergency Thursday in the face of overwhelming numbers of suicides and suicide attempts on South Dakota’s largest reservation.

Chief Teresa TwoBulls declared a State of Emergency weeks ago, as conditions have become unbearable in a very harsh winter. The White House is silent.

Where is the HOPE that President Obama has promised? Where is HOPE for the Lakota?

Here is the President’s Opening words to the Tribal Nations Conference last November.

I have never quite understood people who travel oversees and put forth so much effort to help those in Under developed countries, when we have a place right here in the US that has Third World conditions. Technically, this place is not “in the United States.” It is an Indian Reservation, therefore a Sovereign Nation.

- snip –

• The Average life expectancy

on the Reservation is 46

• Pine Ridge Teen suicide rate is 150 times higher than the National Average

• 65% of the residents of the Reservation live in sub-standard conditions such as no electricity, running water, and often, without heat

Thanks to navajo and a robust crew of volunteers and diarists, the snow emergency on the Indian Reservations in the Dakotas found its way to the TV (thanks, Keith!) and more donations have started to flow. (Navajo’s excellent compilation of donation contact info and links here.) My intention is to add a little background to the story, because it’s annoying as all get-out that this has ever become a situation for charity.

In the early days of the United States, Indian Affairs was an agency under the War (later Defense) Department. Not unlike the private contractors in Iraq, the Indian agents in the field typically did much better than the people they were charged with protecting and assisting. Often much better.

With much bloodshed and ruthless, duplicitous behavior, the indigenous population of the US was driven from its homelands, and confined to reservations. (Except for the tribes, like the Mandans on the Plains, that died off completely.) Tactics included wanton slaughter of the buffalo to deprive the natives of their means of material survival, thus forcing them into submission and opening up their territories for white settlers. Public debate back in the 1800s centered on questions like whether or not the Indians were human possessing souls, and whether the nations first peoples should be “civilized” or simply killed off by genocide.

Private Allotments

The latter option was only partially accomplished (via bounties for Indian scalps, and other atrocities), and the former eventually became policy. In the 1880s, the Dawes Act was passed, dividing much reservation land into individually owned allotments, meant to be developed as family farms. In short order, most Indian land ended up in non-Indian ownership. This is not so surprising, if one considers that the Indians had non-written languages, and concepts like foreclosure and executed contracts and arguing cases before judges in courtrooms were utterly and completely alien to them. The very concept of individuals owning a piece of ground wasn’t how they’d ever thought about their relationship to Mother Earth. Of course, this is grossly oversimplified, since there are a wide array of cultures amongst the hundreds of different tribes once native within the present U.S. boundaries. But it applies pretty well to the nomadic Plains tribes with reservations on the High Plains.

In time, the ability to transfer title of Indian land to non-Indian owners was curtailed. (Except when the Congress declares an emergency – like in World War II, when large tracts of Lakota and Washington state’s Nisqually lands got annexed to military facilities, never to be returned. But I digress.)

Legally, to this day, the federal government has a trust responsibility towards the tribes. Tribes exist, legally, as dependent sovereign entities, with all the ambiguity and confusion that oxymoronic phrase suggests. There are treaty obligations the U.S. government owes the tribes, in exchange for giving up most of the country. For laying down their arms, and not contesting (i.e. killing) settlers taking over most all of what was once theirs. Those obligations include health care, education and various general welfare items such as roads.

Too often, uninformed people tend to think of those obligations as some kind of welfare. I think of it is as if there were an “interest-only” mortgage on the entire country, and the U.S. owes, in perpetuity, to make good on the deal.

The Cobell Case

There’s another frequently overlooked angle on the impoverished state of the reservations. The federal government, via the Bureau of Indian affairs (long since transferred from War to Interior Dept.), acts as a trustee for both the tribes and the owners of the individual land allotments. Remembering that the allotments were first carved up back in the 1800s, and that the owners typically died without written wills or even file change of title (much less have a survey done) when a piece of land was sold or given away, keeping track of the ownership of these tracts is a non-trivial problem.

The feds, as trustees, have leased out lands for various purposes over the decades – purposes such as logging, mining, grazing, farming (where non-Indians could get soil bank payments for not planting crops, but Indians could not) and oil and gas drilling. As trustees, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was supposed to account for those payments, and disburse them to the land owners.

The records were bad, and back in the 1990s, a Blackfeet woman from Montana called Eloise Cobell, a banker, started getting serious about getting those records accounted for, and proper payments made to landowners for said leases. Let me restate the problem: For well over a century, the US government had been taking in lease payments, but couldn’t account for something in excess of $100 billion dollars dating back to the 1880s. A trustee in any other context would have had their ass tossed in jail long since for such sloppy work. To be clear, payments were made over, but there weren’t records to account for it all.

On June 10, 1996, Indian plaintiffs including Elouise P. Cobell, Mildred Cleghorn, Thomas Maulson and James Louis Larose, filed a class action lawsuit against the federal government for its failure to properly manage Indian trust assets on behalf of all present and past individual Indian trust beneficiaries, including over 300,000 current Individual Indian Money (IIM) account holders. The assets at issue are the monies that belong to the individual Indians. The named defendants are the Secretaries of the Interior and Treasury and the Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs

The case moved along slowly under a Reagan-appointed federal judge, until the Bush-Cheney years. Gale Norton and her minions got declared in contempt of court by Judge Lambeth, who had strong language about their lack of good faith action in the matter. So strong that the Bush Justice Department successfully moved to have him removed, nearly a decade into the case. John McCain, Chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee while the Republicans were in the majority in the Senate insisted that $25 million was too large a sum to settle on the case. So it went nowhere.

On June 10, 1996, Indian plaintiffs including Elouise P. Cobell, Mildred Cleghorn, Thomas Maulson and James Louis Larose, filed a class action lawsuit against the federal government for its failure to properly manage Indian trust assets on behalf of all present and past individual Indian trust beneficiaries, including over 300,000 current Individual Indian Money (IIM) account holders. The assets at issue are the monies that belong to the individual Indians. The named defendants are the Secretaries of the Interior and Treasury and the Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs.

…

also in 2008, the District Court granted equitable restitution to the plaintiff class based on the unproven shortfall of the trust’s actual value as compared with its statistically likely value. It stressed that breaching the duty to account did not generate the government’s financial liability. Rather, it said the government’s failure properly to allocate and pay trust funds to beneficiaries gave rise to restitution or disgorgement of the very money that had been withheld. The plaintiff class was awarded $455,600,000 (although this figure did not include interest).

A settlement was announced two months ago on December 8, 2009 – a specific case where the Democrats are different from (and better than) the Republicans:

Yes. The federal government has agreed to create a $1.412 billion Accounting/Trust Administration Fund and $2 billion Trust Land Consolidation Fund. The Settlement also creates a federal Indian Education Scholarship fund of up to $60 million to improve access to higher education for Indian youth.

Needless to say, it’s too soon for this all to have been implemented, but it’s a step in the right direction. And, too, remember that none of this is welfare or charity. It’s what’s due – long past due.

The Current Situation

What I’ve written above isn’t immediately germane to the acute crisis currently unfolding on the reservations. That’s the consequence of other kinds of neglect and malfeasance than just that covered in the Cobell suit, which litigation only covers accounting for leases of individually-owned land allotments.

Basic welfare issues on the Reservations are the responsibility of the federal government. State jurisdiction is limited, and rightly so, owing to disputes like those of salmon fishing rights of Coast Salish tribes in western Washington. As it happens, I was in the courtroom when the 1974 Boldt decision was delivered, and the wiki description comports with my own understanding of the case:

The decision was the culmination of years of State of Washington limitation of treaty fishing by the Tribes, resulting in the United States suing the State of Washington to force the state to comply with the treaties. It was immediately met with shock and outrage by non-Native fishermen, but the ruling has held for more than 30 years.

The Boldt decision also upheld that U.S. federal treaties signed with the Native Americans continue to be in effect as are all International Treaties agreed to with the U.S. government.

So, the donations are good, as a humanitarian effort to rescue people in trouble in an emergency situation. Navajo’s diary from yesterday is full of contact information and links for donations, such as:

Thanks to KossackKeith Olbermann, 3 major charities benefiting the South Dakota reservations will get some huge donations now. Today, I want to call your attention to a faster and more direct way you can help. The LIHEAP (Low Income Home Energy Home Assistance) programs ran out of winter funding in early December. Here’s the hard part; you will need to write a check because of no online presence for any tribe.

But Keith got it right in the bolded words below:

Transcript courtesy of Kimberley:

“And now tonight’s first Quick Comment, and you overwhelm me–as usual.

“Last night, continuing our coverage of the humanitarian crisis on the ice storm and blizzard ravaged reservations of South Dakota, I mentioned a Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Storm Relief emergency assistance fund, and we linked to it. They were hoping, by the end of the month, to have raised $35,000.

In 24 hours, you donated approximately $185,000. They thank you and I thank you.

“If anybody wants to go further, the chairman of the tribe tells us the consciousness of politicians is as important as donations right now. FEMA has yet to declare the region a disaster area, and there’s something else that could kill about 40 birds with one stone there: They’ve patched much of the water and power infrastructure back together but they really need an overhaul and something in the jobs bill, or some stimulus money, could not only protect power, heat and water there, it could also put some of the thousands of unemployed Native Americans to work in their own communities. So you could call, write, or e-mail your congressmen and or senator.

So this diary is a call for action that way – putting a little pressure on the political will. Reminding our elected officials that the nation has a trust obligation to the tribes. It’s not charity, and it’s not welfare, and there’s a lot of room for improvement. Contacting any Senator or House member could help, but those serving on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee are particularly relevant, so here’s their contact information. You know what to do from here:

We’ve also had a number of Kossacks volunteer to be a part of a new team (currently un-named) that will focus on a continuing diary series on the current conditions of our poorest reservations and discuss proactive and preventative measures that could be taken to prevent similar disasters next winter.

“If anybody wants to go further, the chairman of the tribe tells us the consciousness of politicians is as important as donations right now.

FEMA has yet to declare the region a disaster area, and there’s something else that could kill about 40 birds with one stone there: They’ve patched much of the water and power infrastructure back together but they really need an overhaul and something in the jobs bill, or some stimulus money, could not only protect power, heat and water there, it could also put some of the thousands of unemployed Native Americans to work in their own communities. So you could call, write, or e-mail your congressmen and or senator.

To reiterate, “The consciousness of politicians is as important as donations right now.”

“Apartheid” is certainly a strong word. And certainly, there are recognized tribes in the U.S. that are now achieving certain levels of relative prosperity primarily due to federal law allowing them to operate casinos, But the data contained in this section as well as others in this report (see, e.g., Violence Against Women, The Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health) reflect what only can be described as a system of Apartheid on many Indian Reservations, where Indigenous people are warehoused in poverty and neglect. By purpose or effect, their only option is forced assimilation, the abandonment of their land, families, language and cultures in search of a better life.

The Shadow Report Outlines the following: critical things the U.S. Periodic Report omitted that were supposed to have been reported to the Human Rights Committee; Un – recognized Indigenous Peoples of which “many have waited decades” for recognition; the “Indian Reservation Apartheid;” the “Life Expectancy on the Indian Reservation” with its “high rate of infant mortality, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease;” poverty and unemployment, overall problems with justice; ”Racially Discriminatory Constitutional Foundations;” religious freedom as it relates to access to sacred lands; “Environmental Racism and its effects on Indigenous Human Rights,” that “you cannot damage the land without damaging those who live upon it;” “The Denial of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in the Political, Economic, Social, Cultural, or any Other Field of Public Life;” ”Racist Science and the Collective Right of Free, Prior and Informed Consent;” “Articles 6 and 7,” which mention the devastation of Indian Boarding Schools and “Racist Sports Mascots and Logos;” and finally, “The United States and its Transnational Companies and Violations of the Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples Abroad.”

Continuing with enlightening “the consciousness of politicians” in this most current example wherein “FEMA has yet to declare the region a disaster area,” let’s focus on “But the data contained in this section as well as others in this report (see, e.g., Violence Against Women, The Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health) reflect what only can be described as a system of Apartheid on many Indian Reservations, where Indigenous people are warehoused in poverty and neglect.” What are the enlightening questions?

Why has “FEMA has yet to declare the region a disaster area” in a location(s) where “Life Expectancy on the Indian Reservation” is:

Mortality rates and life expectancy on the reservation are not reported by the US in their Periodic Report. Neither is comprehensive data collected for Indians on Reservations. The grossly disproportionate poverty that Indigenous Peoples experience in the United States is accompanied by disturbingly low life expectancy as demonstrated by the few scattered statistics available. Recent research on diverse racial-geographic population groupings in the United States has shown “disparities in mortality experiences” to be “enormous.”[10] Among those found to be most disadvantaged in this major national study were American Indians who live on or near reservation lands.

For that matter, why hasn’t John McCain of the Indian Affairs Committee done anything?

A public research website: http://www.cain2008.org has brought together diverse historical elements of factual proof that Senator John McCain’s was the key “point man” introducing, enacting and enforcing law that removed Dineh-Navajo Families from their reservation on the Black Mesa in Arizona.

Although there’s been a recent victory against the reopening of the Black Mesa Complex, the Kayenta mine is still operating and elders on the front lines fighting the continued impacts of coal mining and forced relocation efforts are still requesting support.

When “the consciousness of politicians” allows for “…the largest forced relocation of U.S. citizens since the relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II,” then they needn’t be sought for help, but helped to the Hague. So what might be pragmatic?

“This agency participated in the ethnic cleansing that befell the Western tribes,” Gover said. “It must be acknowledged that the deliberate spread of disease, the decimation of the mighty bison herds, the use of the poison alcohol to destroy mind and body, and the cowardly killing of women and children made for tragedy on a scale so ghastly that it cannot be dismissed as merely the inevitable consequence of the clash of competing ways of life.”

Concluding, while the “consciousness of politicians” motivates them to ignore the devastation that winter storms have brought to many Tribal Nations, I have but one question for them – “”What does it mean to be civilized?”